I didn't leave my heart in San Francisco...

...but something far more valuable. So for this post to make sense, you ought to read my last 2 posts, about my experience of using my credit card in the US. The first talked about the customer experience, and how varied it was. Some of the quirks were allegedly to improve security, yet offered no perceivable additional security. When asked, the retailers I spoke to saw EMV as offering no better security and a worse customer experience. The second was noting that many of the threads around card fraud led to the US – either cards being skimmed there, or card details from around the world ending up in the US, where just the mag stripe is required. Saturday morning I got a call on my mobile. I’ll write another post later about this and how banks tell you to be careful about highly professional looking phishing scams… and then contact you in ways that look like amateur phishing scams! The point of the call was… to say my cards details have being skimmed as they assumed I hadn’t spent a lot of money in person at an art shop in India. Actually, given I had been using my PIN in a terminal 5 miles from house, in a shop I go in most Saturdays about 20mins before that transaction, I was rather shocked by the fact that they’d authorised it anyway even it was highly unlikely it was me. And guess what? "have you had to swipe your card recently? That's probably where they got the details" Yes, reader - in almost all certainly, stolen whilst I was in the US. If only they had full EMV, then this almost certainly wouldn’t have happened.